Symposium On Usable Privacy and Security

LIGHTNING TALKS

The 2026 Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS) will bring together an interdisciplinary group of researchers and practitioners in human-computer interaction, security, and privacy. The program will feature:

• technical papers, including replication papers and systematization of knowledge papers,
• a poster session,
• lightning talks, and
• workshops and tutorials.

This year SOUPS will be held at Leibniz University Hannover in Germany, in collaboration with CISPA.

Call for Lightning Talks

All dates are at 23:59 AoE (Anywhere on Earth) time.

Submissions received after May 28, 2026, will be considered until the program is full.

Accepted lightning talks will be presented during the main conference program. More details will be provided as they are finalized.

Lightning Talks Co-Chairs

Lucy Simko, Barnard College

Kentrell Owens, Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy

Overview

A continuing feature of SOUPS is a session of strictly timed 5-minute lightning talks. These talks provide an opportunity to interact with the SOUPS community on a range of usable privacy and security topics. Examples of acceptable topics include:

• Discussion of your research vision, potentially including preliminary research results
• Describing a challenge in research, industry, or government that could benefit from community feedback, attention, and new collaborations
• Recounting lessons learned from conducting user studies in academia, industry, or government labs
• Introducing an open-source tool or community project to encourage attendees to use or contribute to it
• Presenting an exciting visualization, new user interface, or interaction paradigm related to security and privacy

We particularly encourage students and practitioners in the industry who have never before presented at SOUPS, especially first-time attendees, to submit a lightning talk proposal. This is a great opportunity to present your research interests and vision to the community, generate hallway conversation, and receive helpful feedback. Lighting talk abstracts will be made publicly available through the conference program. We also invite advisors to encourage their students to present ongoing work.

Submit Your Proposal

If you would like to give a lightning talk, please complete the submission form above or email us at soups26lightning@googlegroups.com with your name, affiliation, title of the talk, and a brief abstract (up to 200 words). Your abstract should include how your talk is relevant to SOUPS and how it will benefit the SOUPS community.

Contact

For questions or to discuss lightning talks proposals, email us at: soups26lightning@googlegroups.com